Optimizing Greater Status

[Flickerdart]

So, there's a spell called greater status (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/divine/spells/statusGreater.htm). In a nutshell, it lets you use touch buffs of up to 2nd level at unlimited range. This seems like it has the potential to be very useful - a team buffer could perform his role while out of harm's way entirely, or sell his services on the side and make a bit of extra income.

So this thread is basically looking for two things: good spells for greater status and ways to get around its pesky restrictions. The most important ones are:

Breaking the 2nd level spells cap
Using non-touch range spells
Getting a better idea of the situation than the spell itself provides


Abusing Sanctum Spell helps a bit, since it lets you downgrade 3rd level spells to 2nd level ones. Being able to snag spells of a lower level than usual off of other lists seems like a good approach for an Archivist with greater status to take. There might be some ways of turning non-touch spells into touch ones, too.

[Thrice Dead Cat]

For the non-touch to touch spell issue, isn't there a version of spell channeling without that restriction? It may not work in this instance, but I could have sworn at least one class had the ability to channel non-touch spells. Getting those spells to work for Greater Status is another issue, admittedly.

Also, there are at least 2, possibly 3, versions of Greater Status out there. There's the one from the SRD, which seems to be from Deities and Demigods, the one from Heroes of Battle, which I believe was a massive downgrade, and possibly another I can't quite remember.

[Piggy Knowles]

Sanctum Spell can let you cheat in third level spells.

[Vertharrad]

One version from BoED.

[Fax Celestis]

There might be some ways of turning non-touch spells into touch ones, too.

It's too bad Reach Spell doesn't explicitly make your spell a ray (just a ranged touch, which is functionally identical so I don't know why there's a difference), because you could couple it with 7 levels of Enlightened Fist for Hold Ray shenanigans.

[Thrice Dead Cat]

One version from BoED.

It appears that this version is identical to the one on the SRD. Sadly, the last one printed is in Heroes of Battle, which bumps it up to 5th level, loses the ability to cast spells through it, increases the casting time, the number of targets per level, and the range.

Considering that the BoED has it listed as "Greater Status" and HoB has it in as Status, Greater" you could probably make the case that these are separate spells and those not applicable to the whole "latest printing" rule.